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Chatting In The Gauntlet

January 27, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

For the discomforting performance I referenced in yesterday’s entry, we had set up a seating area on stage so that audience members could sit there and watch the performance looking out at the audience in the permanent seats. The cast referred to it as a gauntlet arrangement and from the tension it evoked, it was probably an apt description.

Can’t Talk Now, I Am Acting
Part of the performance involved the participation of “volunteers” from the audience. These people were chosen from those seated on stage and at one point, they help secure a performer in a bungee rig. An interesting thing happened. One of the volunteers started chatting with the artistic director while the bungees were being flown in about how much he had wanted to take her master class and maybe even take a dance class at the college. Striking up a conversation during the performance was a pretty strange thing to do, but the show was a little strange itself. After the show he spoke with all the cast members and even emailed the group complimenting the performance.

Those that spoke to him didn’t get the sense that he normally had problems acknowledging social boundaries. He was just really excited by his experience and wanted to talk about it.

Encourage People To Text During Your Monologue?
I started to wonder if this might be a sign of things to come as people begin to expect that the ease and immediacy of social media conversations be translated into their face to face encounters. We have already seen the negative side of this with people talking on cell phones and texting during performances. But this incident Saturday night gave me some insight into the constructive possibilities if a performance was well-designed to take advantage of these impulses.

There seems to be a growing practice at conferences that people Twitter about the speaker/panels, often with the hope that someone is monitoring the tweets and will adjust the content accordingly to either address areas of interest/questions or move past the boring parts. This sort of interactivity could be harnessed for a performance to change its direction every night.

But I wonder if there is a way to create an entirely new dynamic between performers and audiences in which a more extensive interaction than the way having people call out suggestions at improv shows transpires. I don’t know exactly how it would manifest, but I can imagine the performers would act to guide things in a general direction and integrate audience members either individually or as a collective resource.

How Sharper Than A Serpents Tooth Is A Marginalized Audience
What I am fairly certain of is that it won’t be a matter of trying to adapt what is already done to include patrons. People may find some successes, but shoehorning your audience into King Lear isn’t going to cut it in the long run. The format may evolve from current practice in stages, but I think it will depart from it eventually.

The success of this idea hinges on the guy from this weekend being a sign of things to come where people are less self-conscious about stepping forward to become involved in social interactions in general rather than an outlier. Given that those who watch YouTube videos far outstrip those who contribute, I don’t expect self-consciousness to ever erode so far that everyone will want to be up on stage.

Fits With Other Trends
It occurs to me that a situation where those with training/greater experience in the arts act to guide those with less dovetails well with other trends we have been hearing about. It would allow Pro-Ams to become more involved and pursue their interests if greater opportunities existed. If arts people became more adept at directing people without arts training in various activities, then perhaps they will gain the requisite skills to drive the creative economy we are told is emerging.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Getting What I Wanted…And Then Some

January 26, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

From the “watch what you wish for” file. Last Friday I was driving home pondering the fact that far fewer people purchased tickets over the phone or in person than they did even five years ago. As a result we have lost an opportunity to speak with people and gain clues about what their impetus was for coming to the show and what sort of experience they expect. Certainly, we can speak with people in the lobby before the show and at intermission, but both our ability and time frame in which to act on things we learn is impaired. We also aren’t getting information like “my wife asked me to call for tickets for our friends and ourselves…” to learn who it is that initiates the attendance process.

Technology allows us to provide information and an opportunity to purchase 24 hours a day. However, I being to feel that the communication stream between our patron base and ourselves is increasingly one way. We provide the information telling them about the show on our websites, emails and stories but we get relatively little back from our community. If they didn’t buy tickets, we might not get any sign of response at all. Lack of purchase may not necessarily indicate lack of interest, just use of the wrong communication channel to reach people.

So as I was driving home Friday, I started pondering making today’s entry an open letter to our communities telling them they needed to be partners in the communication process to let us know if we were meeting their expectations.

Then came our show on Saturday.

We had advertised the performance everywhere noting that it was for mature audiences only. You couldn’t buy tickets online without seeing an image of the brash performance group making crude gestures (crotch grabbing, etc). We didn’t hide that the show might offend people. We warned people we suspected might be upset by it, including mentioning that it might not be suitable for their kids. We made a similar announcement before we opened the door that night.

Within 10 minutes people walked out and asked for a refund. I gave it without question because there was worse than that to come and I didn’t want to be accused of manipulating them into sticking around. More people walked out at a particularly intense scene. One woman threw her program book down in the row in front of me and criticized the choice of the performance while the show was continuing on stage before storming away from me. (This was the person who had come in to buy tickets and we cautioned against bringing her kids.)

Let me just say at this juncture that the show, while quite unsettling, wasn’t providing an extreme experience. There is far more coarse language concentrated in the first 10 minutes of David Mamet’s American Buffalo. The subjects being covered frankly and with some profanity, were not pleasant ones as you might imagine. I started to realize that people may be confusing being made very uncomfortable with actual obscene acts. Far more violence and sexual situations can be seen on television and in film but there is nothing to mediate the experience when it is live.

I admit that the show made me uncomfortable as I knew it would and I approached the lobby at intermission and the end of the show with some trepidation. But I guess everyone who hated the show had already left because no one approached me with complaints.

-One woman praised me for being brave enough to present the piece. She said of the four people in her group, she liked the show the best. She also said we gave her group something to talk about on the ride home. They were one of the last people to quit the lobby that night.

-Another woman told us that she was amazed at how far the performers went with the subjects. She noted that most of the time, groups were afraid to really commit themselves to fully exploring tough subjects so she was amazed when she realized they had reached the point people usually retreated from were going to just continue on. She said something to the effect of “I have had these conversations in private before and was flabbergasted that someone was saying them aloud for all the world to hear.” She said she was going to blog on the experience. We told her we hoped she would and asked her to send us the link.

-One of our students said his perspectives had changed.

-This weekend the performers forwarded comments attendees had left on their website. The commenters repeated the sentiment about the show giving them a lot to talk about.

I was surprised that we didn’t receive any negative emails or calls about the show over the weekend. The woman who complained to me in the theatre during the performance did call today to continue her criticism. I mostly just listened and let her talk. She told me how the show was inappropriate for the type of organization she perceived we were. Even though I didn’t agree with her about the type of places these shows should be performed; the responses of other audience members clearly showed there was some value in broaching the subject, I didn’t mention any of that.

This was the conversation I was yearning to have with my audiences on Friday. I didn’t necessarily want to have a criticism infused discussion, but I was getting what I had wanted–an audience member telling me how she perceived our organization and what she valued about it.

I really don’t have any desire or ambition to upset my audiences to elicit these sort of conversations from them. I would love for them to say these things to me all the time. But even if I was having rich, meaningful conversations with my audiences all the time, I would still present challenging work that made sense for us when I had the opportunity. Conversations on those subjects are desirable as well.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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If I Were David Byrne…

January 20, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

I just couldn’t help it.

When I started reading the reactions (Theatre Ideas has a good discussion in comments section) to David Byrne’s blog post about how spending on the arts is prioritized (including what sort of arts were getting priority), the first thing that came to mind was a line from Crash Test Dummies 1993 song, “When I Go Out With Artists.”

The song starts out with the singer feeling overwhelmed and somewhat alienated by all the specialized language surrounding art and feeling a little anxious about being asked what he thought of the art. He imagines David Byrne wouldn’t have that problem.

If I were David Byrne
I’d go to galleries and not be too concerned
Well I would have a cup of coffee
And I’d find my surroundings quite amusing and
People would ask me which were my favorite paintings

All I could think upon reading Byrne’s entry was that he actually is concerned about the measure of art, acknowledging that he doesn’t really get Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, though he doesn’t feel he is any less accomplished as a musician for it. I very much get the sense that if Byrne was in the Crash Test Dummies’ hypothetical gallery, he wouldn’t find his surroundings very amusing if one was required to subscribe to tightly defined standards of evaluating art.

Of course, not everything is negative in Crash Test Dummies’ universe. While everyone is pretty snooty, single malt whiskeys get their proper due and greater exposure.

Audience Relations, State of the Arts

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Only 15 Minutes Of Fame For Tragedies?

January 19, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Lucy Bernholz at Philanthropy 2173 makes some fascinating reflections on the impact of technology on giving vis a vis the Haitian earthquake relief efforts.

I confess a huge amount of skepticism when I had first heard that one could donate to the relief effort via text messaging on your cell phones. I wondered how much the phone companies were profiting off this and how big a cut the donation processors would be taking. Apparently I wasn’t the only one because according to Bernholz, the phone companies have waived the fees under pressure of public opinion.

She also talks about the possibility that those who received funds may be under greater scrutiny. I remember after Hurricane Katrina, many people were horrified to learn how great a percentage of their donations were going to administrative overhead at the Red Cross and similar organizations. The Red Cross has shown some transparency by tweeting near real time updates of the climbing donation totals. Bernholz suggests that Twitter may become the platform where this is not only reported–but where people also question what has been done with the money.

The suggestion that really grabbed my attention was her idea that technology might cause/allow people to acquire “Donor Attention Deficit Disorder”

That people all over the world can be so instantly engaged and moved to donate is certainly a good thing. But does it come with costs?

On Wednesday, January 13, #Haiti was a trending topic on Twitter all day (a measure of what the millions of tweets are discussing). By Thursday, January 14, it was gone. Does the ability to give instantly and painlessly (mobile donors won’t even see a charge for the gift until they get their next phone bill) make it extra easy to give and move on? Will “donor fatigue” be replaced by “donor A.D.D.?”

The concept that even tragedies have only 15 minutes of fame before people move on is pretty chilling. If the best tactic for successful fund raising is providing people with an opportunity to give at the point where the emotional appeal is greatest, it is going to be increasingly difficult to sustain any sort of long term support. And how long will it be before people become inured to solicitations of calculated to concentrate a great deal of emotional response in a short span. Such an approach might stunt efforts to gather support for true tragedies.

It probably doesn’t help that we are told to just give money. Granted, in this case, it just isn’t practical to become physically involved. Much less so that after Hurricane Katrina. There is also something of an underlying message that once you have given, you no longer need to be engaged with the problem. All you are being asked to do is just give money and you can accomplish that by doing something you enjoy doing everyday–text a number.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Fundraising, New Initiatives

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